Summary week 2

Designing out barriers to student access
and participation in secondary school assessment

Writer: Linda J. Graham, Haley Tancredi, Jill Willis, and Kelli McGraw.

Year: 2017

Background:
Assessment task sheets are invitations to create performances that will be judged or assessed by others. By being aware of the criteria against which they will be judged, teachers hope students will grow their capacity for self-assessment and active participation.

The most influential theory:

Imagine that a book in an elementary school library is on a shelf 6-feet above
the ground (with no ladders or other assistance available). In order to have an
opportunity to read the book, a student must have access to the book. The fact
that the book is on a shelf so high is a ‘condition of access’; it is an
environmental and external factor. This condition of access determines that a
necessary ‘criterion of access’ to the book is the ability to reach a height of
6-feet; a child 4-feet tall would not (without assistance) have access to the
book, hence would have no opportunity to read it. The criteria of access in this
case, height or jumping ability, are personal factors, but they are not internal;
they are criteria of access precisely because of certain external conditions.
(Burbules et al. 1982, p. 175, their emphasis)

Findings:

The three layers of analysis have identified numerous areas in which the conditions of access set by the task design impose additional criteria of access that distract from the first-order purpose of the task and which inadvertently discriminate against students with ADHD and DLD by requiring students to

• negotiate unnecessary visual complexity,

• distinguish between important and unimportant information,

• decipher what action is necessary from different sections of the task sheet which contradict,

• reconcile competing purposes,

• deliver a written speech in too short a timeframe,

• engage with long, complex sentences and instructions that were most likely written for teachers, and

• interpret specialist and technical language that may or may not have been explicitly taught in class.

Implications in ELT:

Alongside principles, professional learning about conditions of access can help teachers make adjustments to their assessment designs. When teachers come to understand the barriers that conditions of access can create, they can readily ‘design out’ the types of accessibility issues we have identified in our analysis of the sample task sheet. In our research with two participating secondary schools, we used a preliminary version of the above recommendations in the form of an ‘‘accessibility checklist’’ to support teachers in their design work.

Visual accessibility

The layout helps the students access the important elements of the task

• The most important information is easy to find

• White space is used to separate sections

• Text size aids readability (11 or 12 point font with 1.5 line spacing)

• Margins are left-justified

• Visual cues direct student attention

• Information that is irrelevant to students is not included

Procedural accessibility

Consistency and clarity of instructions

• Authentic context is relevant

• Common access barriers have been addressed in the design

• The task, objectives and criteria align

• Students are able to respond within the prescribed conditions

• Enough space and resources are provided for responses

• The assessment is scheduled to give students the best opportunity for success

• Processes for evaluating quality are clear

• Authentication strategies are included

• Student feedback on the draft task was sought

• Teacher peer feedback on draft task was sought

Linguistic accessibility

Directions are clear

• Instructions are clear and direct

• Sentences are short and simply structured

• The language is free of bias

• Specialist language is defined using student-friendly terms

• Information is stated once only and if it needs to be referenced more than once, consistent terminology is used.